Obama Asks Businesses for Help as He Vows to Cut Regulations

June 13 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama told almost
two dozen current and former corporate leaders he’ll work with
businesses to reduce hurdles to job creation, including
regulations, while asking their help lobbying Congress on
measures to boost the recovery.

Obama met for more than an hour with his Council on Jobs
and Competitiveness in Durham, North Carolina, hearing a
selection of proposals from panel members, including General
Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt and American
Express Co. Chairman and CEO Kenneth Chenault, to create 1
million new jobs over the next two years.

“Sometimes we are going to need legislation and where we
do, having a group like this that can reach a bipartisan
consensus and then push Congress to act, I think, can make an
extraordinary difference,” Obama said at the meeting, held at
the headquarters of Cree Inc., the Durham-based maker of energy-efficient light-emitting diode products, which are becoming
increasingly common in homes, businesses and municipal
applications such as streetlights.

With the next election less than 18 months away, the
president is seeking to convince the business community as well
as voters that his economic policies will help restore long-term
growth even as data indicate the recovery is slowing.

North Carolina was the first stop on a two-day swing for
Obama that will take him to two states -- he speaks at
Democratic Party fundraisers tonight in Florida -- that are
critical to his re-election and where unemployment rates top the
national average of 9.1 percent.

Most Serious Issue

In a speech to Cree workers after the jobs panel meeting,
Obama said, “The single most serious economic problem we face
is getting people back to work.”

Republicans, including the candidates seeking the party’s
nomination to challenge Obama in 2012, have said the president’s
policies have failed to lift the U.S. as the country emerged
from the worst recession since the 1930s.

Obama is “leading from behind” when it comes to
addressing the economy, former Minnesota Governor and Republican
presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said on the Fox News Sunday
program yesterday. “He has run out of ideas,” he said. “We
have tried it his way, and it doesn’t work.”

With the White House and Congress mired in negotiations to
cut government spending and raise the $14.3 trillion federal
debt ceiling, Obama has few fiscal options to give the economy a
jolt.

‘Concrete Impediment’

The president said the government’s long-term debt and the
deficit need to be resolved because “they are a concrete
impediment to growth and jobs.”

“The administration has put themselves in a box,” said
Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Analytics in
West Chester, Pennsylvania. “The most important thing for
deficit reduction is to get the economy growing again.”

Immelt and Chenault laid out in an op-ed article in today’s
Wall Street Journal five steps the panel is recommending to
create more than 1 million jobs in five specific areas.

They include training workers through partnerships with
community colleges, cutting red tape to speed creation of
construction jobs, boosting travel and tourism by easing the
visa process for visitors, offering more help to small business
owners seeking funding from the Small Business Administration
and concentrating on jobless construction workers by putting
them to work on energy projects.

‘Relentless Focus’

At the meeting, Chenault said the goal is “to create jobs
across all income levels,” a task that will require a
“relentless focus” by businesses and the government. Most of
the actions won’t require major legislation or a long lead time
to put in place, he said. They will make “a significant down
payment on job creation.”

Citigroup Inc. Chairman Richard Parsons, another member of
the council, said afterward that private employers must work
closely with the government to remove impediments to job
creation.

“The reality is the private sector always had the lead in
job creation,” Parsons said in a Bloomberg Television
interview.

Parsons said the jobs council has been focusing on ways to
help capital reach startup companies and small businesses,
“which are the generators of the great majority of jobs.”

“The economy is going, it’s continuing to grow, but there
is still an awful lot of volatility out there and uncertainty,”
he said. “We have to get our job creation engine going again.”

Obama has spent this year seeking to repair relations with
the business community, and the administration is still working
to overcome criticism from some executives that its regulatory
policies are creating uncertainty for companies.

Reviewing Regulations

The president said today that while regulations, such as
those that protect the air and water, are necessary to protect
the public, it also is important to make sure they are serving
the purpose for which they are intended.

The administration announced last month that 30 federal
agencies will seek to repeal or modify regulations in an effort
to reduce reporting requirements and save businesses billions of
dollars in compliance costs.

The revisions are the result of a review Obama ordered on
Jan. 18, saying he wanted “to remove outdated regulations that
stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.”

The spate of recent economic data suggesting the recovery
is slowing has made the effort all the more urgent for Obama as
he begins laying the groundwork for his re-election campaign.

Payrolls grew at the slowest pace in eight months in May,
Labor Department figures released June 3 showed, while other
data show manufacturing has slowed and the economy is
decelerating.

Since World War II, no U.S. president has won re-election
with a jobless rate above 6 percent with the exception of Ronald
Reagan, who faced 7.2 percent unemployment on Election Day in
1984.

“The sky’s not falling,” Obama said as he concluded the
meeting with his advisory panel. “The question is, are we going
to build on the strengths that we’ve got, are we going to
eliminate some of the weaknesses that are holding us back.”